In this issue, we present seven original papers with ethnographic insights into topics ranging from vulnerability, the genetic diaspora, and collective life across African, Asian, and South American geographies.

In “Unexpected Callings,” Raffaella Taylor-Seymour explores the efforts of young queer people in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, to draw their own experiences of queerness and their ancestors into the same frame via an epistemological exploration of relationship-building with ancestral spirits. Taylor-Seymour argues that these engagements with amadlozi are neither a straightforwardly local mode of understanding or ex­pressing queerness nor an outright rejection of the Western LGBTQ framework, but rather an attempt to unsettle the dominant narratives surrounding both ances­tors and queerness.

Erin McConkey’s “Toxic Synergy” introduces the notion of the precarious grasp to describe the unstable entanglements between humans and venomous snakes at a Thai antivenom facility, where survival depends on mutual exposure to harm. Snakes and handlers are bound together through forms of care that extend life while sustaining vulnerability, as human labor, snake biology, and biomedical demands are forcibly synchronized.

Starting from the positionality of an ethnographic account of precarious communities in rural Papua New Guinea, in “The Slow Deaths from Climate Change” Jamon Alex Halvaksz II explores the slow violence and death experienced by marginalized, racialized, Indigenous bodies as climate change differentially impacts communities across the globe.

In “Deceptive Sanctity,” Shamim Homayun analyzes discourses about findables and hidden wealth in Afghanistan—not to challenge or confirm their veracity, but in terms of what these narratives reveal about everyday concerns about exploitation, knowledge, and access.

In “Sensing Bimba,” Victoria M. Massie reorients the study of genetic diaspora away from its genetic constitution and toward the constitution of a relation to people and places that exceed DNA test results, drawing from fieldwork in the United States and Cameroon. The essay illustrates how the genetic diaspora’s return becomes a new avenue for assessing how transformations in postcolonial sovereignty feels through emerging modes of crisis knowledge pro­duction.

In “Corporate Futures, Energy Transition, and Natural Prosthetics in Colombia’s Cesar Mining Corridor,” Juan Pablo Vera Lugo shows how corporate narratives and practices of social responsibility fail to repair the landscapes, ecologies, or lives of people in the region, through ethnography in the mining corridor of Cesar Department of northern Colombia.  

In "Solo Mothers and New Formations of Collective Life in São Paulo’s Peripheries," Teresa P.R. Caldeira notes that a huge change is taking place in the organization of household life, largely under the radar. Caldeira argues that analyzing the lives and perceptions of solo mothers (who now make up a substantial percentage of all households) allows us to identify an emergent formation of collective life and, consequently, the simultaneous unmaking of the established pattern that tied together the categories of nuclear family, breadwinner, and housemaker.

Cover and table-of-contents image by Erin McConkey.